4Cite’s Email Platform Helps Digital Brands Secure the Path to Purchase

Consumer identification company 4Cite’s lead product Shopping Elsewhere — which triggers emails at the moment when customers are in their inbox or browsing the products of other retailers — increased client revenues by more than 20%, the company announced last week.

“We do identification. But what’s kind of unique about us is that in addition to that, we also trigger marketing campaigns,” said 4Cite CEO Bob Gaito. Shopping Elsewhere email triggers showed a purchase rate lift of 139% over the rate for customers who did not receive an email.

“Across the board with all of our retail clients, the most successful marketing campaign they have is their abandoned shopping cart email campaigns,” Gaito said, referring to emails sent to remind customers that they have items left in their shopping carts.

Through its vast network of tagging, 4Cite is able to tell what products customers have selected in their shopping carts and send product-specific emails to them. The company adds a few lines of code to a webpage, allowing it to track a customer’s journey through a site.

“What’s unique about our tags is that they have a self-healing quality,” Gaito said. This means 4Cite uses a more generic tag that captures several customer actions on a website, rather than just linking the tag to specific actions. The upshot is that even if the retailer changes its website, 4Cite can track customer behaviors through its back end.

“We know the email address associated, we know the type of device they’re on, we know the time of day,” Gaito added. “And if they click on that email, and they land on the site, our tags are there and we pick that up, too.”

Retailers can send 4Cite their offline data so that 4Cite can consider a customer’s in-store purchases when triggering a marketing email. Clients can also share information about their inventory with 4Cite so that emails can promote products sure to be in stock.

Though 4Cite sends 1.5 billion emails monthly to 240 brands — comprising around 40 million active email addresses every month — it doesn’t see itself as an email service provider.

Still, to prevent saturation, the company has created a cadence control engine, which allows it to gauge whether a client has been over-emailing its customers. “It’s not just who should get an email, but also how often,” Gaito said.

In the last several months, 4Cite has taken an increasingly aggressive approach to sales, pursuing partnerships with companies across the retail marketing space. In the last four years, 4Cite has averaged a yearly growth rate of 18 to 25%.

Kate Talerico is a contributing writer at Street Fight.